The invitation from the Tokyo Toilet Project came out of the blue. Would Wim Wenders, the veteran German film director of Paris, Texas and Pina, like to come and see Tokyo’s new collection of 17 architect-designed public lavatories? If he was inspired to make a documentary – or a series of documentaries – that would please everyone.

“It was an open invitation,” Wenders remembers with a smile. “Everyone said ‘it’s fine if you don’t like to do anything; at least you enjoy Tokyo’.”

As it turned out, he enjoyed Tokyo even more than on his many previous visits. The citizens had just emerged from the pandemic and seemed to be managing better than most.

“I had witnessed how my own city of Berlin had come back, and how Rome and Paris had come back – and they … came back with less of a sense of social responsibility... In Tokyo, it was the opposite. People came back for each other and with each other. I thought ‘wow, this is a great moment’.”

The toilets – an ultimate common good – provided a perfect vehicle for exploring that spirit. “But only if I could tell a story.”

The story in Perfect Days is minimal; it is simply an account of a few days in the life of toilet cleaner Hirayama (Koji Yakusho). Hirayama’s life is stripped to a minimum. His flat consists of a single, light-filled room with a kitchenette downstairs.

Once a week, he buys a used literary paperback from the local bookshop’s “one dollar, one book” shelf. He enjoys his collection of old cassettes – Lou Reed, Patti Smith, The Animals – washes in the local bathhouse and eats at the same noodle shop each night.

“Solitude can be many things. There is a desperate solitude and there is a fulfilled solitude,” says Wenders. “And he lives a very fulfilled solitude because he is not alone. He is in touch with many things.”

Hiroyama takes pride in cleaning the toilets perfectly. At the same time, he notices, treasures and sometimes photographs the details that crop up in the corners of his daily routine: an unexpected kindness, a maple seedling sprouting under a parent tree, or the shadows cast by the tree outside his window. There is a word in Japanese for this shadowplay, says Wenders: komorebi. “Which is the effect of sun on the floor, on the walls, mostly shining through trees,” he says. It is beauty, lasting for just a moment, that is conjured from nothing.

Wenders wrote the script with Takuma Takasaki, a poet and novelist he calls “my Japanese twin brother”. Both Takuma and Koji pressed him to explain how Hirayama found himself here. A brief scene where his sister visits – arriving in a chauffeur-driven Lexus – suggests that he didn’t begin his working life in the unskilled pool. Initially reluctant, Wenders realised that this man had made a choice, perhaps a life-saving one.

“So I wrote a past for him where he had been a successful businessman. There is a lot of stress on businessmen in Japan ... they drink a lot, and they get up early and work long hours, and they don’t take care of their families, and they are extremely painful characters, some of them. I know some ... They would like to be something else, but they are very duty-conscious, and they don’t own their lives any more.”

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At some point in the past Wenders imagined for Hirayama, he had a crisis. “And he decided to become a man who was happy with little ... at the risk of becoming invisible himself. Because for many people in society he is invisible. In this way, he feels like the angels I shot in Wings of Desire.”

None of this needs to be in the film, however; Hirayama lives entirely in the present. He doesn’t explain himself; instead, his unspoken emotions ripple across his face rather like the komorebi on his wall. As Wenders says, a Hollywood version of the film would make the toilet cleaner a secret agent; there would be a whole other plot.

“But this is a Japanese film directed by a German director, and we didn’t feel the need to have a spy story or whatever tragedy lurked behind his life or whatever,” he says. “So we just take the man.”

In a society where we all have too much ... a man who has enough, even though he has little, is a Utopian character.

Wim Wenders

When the film had its premiere in Cannes – where Koji won the best actor award – audiences fell in love with him (the film was also nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film, but lost out to The Zone of Interest). “In a society where we all have too much ... a man who has enough, even though he has little, is a Utopian character,” says Wenders. “And we all have that desire in ourselves to have enough and not need more.”

To a great extent, that is Wenders’ own approach to filmmaking. He did make one film in Hollywood: 1982’s ill-fated Hammett for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope, which took four years and was completely re-edited by Coppola after he finished. He returned to Berlin, made his masterpiece, Wings of Desire, and never went back.

“I have done my really best work being thrown into something and doing something spontaneous,” he says. Having decided on a whim to make Perfect Days, he and Takuma wrote the script in three weeks.

Shooting was even faster: they took just 16 days, using a documentary approach: the director of photography, Franz Lustig, had the camera on his shoulder. Most shots were single takes.

“I don’t mind restrictions, that we didn’t have much money or time,” says Wenders. “Actually, I prefer that. If you gave me all the money in the world, I wouldn’t know how to make a movie. I would say please, take 90 per cent of it away! I believe in things you do in one go, then it simply is. You don’t have to go to a committee and rewrite 10 times. We didn’t rewrite anything. We just made the film we wanted to make.” Which shows Wim Wenders, aged 78, once more at the top of his game.

Perfect Days opens on March 28, with advance screenings from March 20.